Some of the most violent
criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where crime from
these lawbreakers is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to
apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of
gang members from a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have snuck back into town
after having been deported for such crimes as murder, shootings, and drug
trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence
in the country is a felony. Yet should an LAPD officer arrest an illegal
gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is the officer who will be treated as a
criminal by his own department — for violating the LAPD’s rule against enforcing
immigration law.

The LAPD’s ban on
immigration enforcement is replicated in immigrant-heavy localities across the
country — in New York, Chicago, Austin, San Diego, and Houston, for example.
These so-called "sanctuary policies" generally prohibit a city’s employees,
including the police, from reporting immigration violations to federal
authorities.

Sanctuary laws are a
testament to the political power of immigrant lobbies. So powerful is this
demographic clout that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal
alien crime wave. "We can’t even talk about it," says a frustrated LAPD captain.
"People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics." Another LAPD commander in a
predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: "I would get a firestorm
of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against
illegals]." Neither captain would speak for attribution.

But however pernicious in
themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader disease: the near
total loss of control over immigration policy. Fifty years ago, immigration
policy may have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive policy.
The non-stop increase of legal and illegal aliens is reshaping the language and
the law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal immigration and,
ultimately, the very idea of national borders.

It is a measure of how
topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that to ask police officials
about the illegal crime problem feels like a gross social faux pas, something
simply not done in polite company. And a police official, asked to violate this
powerful taboo against discussing criminal aliens, will respond with a strangled
response—sometimes, as in the case of a New York deputy commissioner with whom I
spoke, disappearing from communication altogether. At the same time, millions of
illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in plain view, utterly
confident in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.

I asked the Miami Police
Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about his employer’s policy on
illegal law-breakers. In September 2003, the force had arrested a Honduran visa
violator for seven terrifying rapes. The previous year, Miami officers had had
the suspect, Reynaldo Elias Rapalo, in custody for lewd and lascivious
molestation, without checking his immigration status. Had they done so, they
would have discovered his visa overstay, a deportable offense. "We have shied
away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues," explains
Detective Moss, choosing his words carefully, "because of our large immigration
population."

Police commanders may not
want to discuss, much less respond to, the illegal alien crisis, but its
magnitude for law enforcement is startling. Some examples:

• In Los Angeles, 95
percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500)
target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants
(17,000) are for illegal aliens.

• A confidential
California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the
bloody 18th Street Gang in California is illegal (estimated membership:
20,000); police officers say the proportion is undoubtedly much greater. The
gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California
prisons, on complicated drug distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by
assassinations, and is responsible for an assault or robbery every day in Los
Angeles County. The gang has dramatically expanded its numbers over the last
two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, a vast proportion
illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

• The leadership of the
Columbia Li’l Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the
drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in
2002, says former Assistant U.S. Attorney Luis Li. Frank "Pancho Villa"
Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and illegal alien, controlled the gang from
prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.

Good luck finding any
reference to such facts in official crime analysis. The LAPD and the Los Angeles
City Attorney recently requested a judicial injunction against drug trafficking
in Hollywood. The injunction targets the 18th Street Gang and, as the press
release puts it, the "non-gang members" who sell drugs in Hollywood on behalf of
the gang. Those "non-gang members" are virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled
into the country by a trafficking ring organized by 18th Street bigs. The
illegal Mexicans pay off their transportation debt to the gang by selling drugs;
many soon realize how lucrative that line of work is and stay in the business.

The immigration status of
these non-gang "Hollywood dealers," as the City Attorney calls them, is
universally known among officers and gang prosecutors. But the gang injunction
is silent on the matter. And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest an illegal
dealer (known on the street as a "border brother") for his immigration status,
or even notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),* he would be severely
disciplined for violation of Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.

[ * In 2003, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was broken up into three bureaus in
the Department of Homeland Security (DHS): the Bureau of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE); the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP); and U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). This Backgrounder focuses on ICE,
which is responsible for, among other things, enforcement of federal immigration
laws in the interior of the United States.]

The ordinarily tough-as-nails
former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates enacted Special Order 40 in 1979 — in response to
the city’s burgeoning population of illegal aliens — showing that even the most
unapologetic law-and-order cop is no match for immigration demographics. The
order prohibits officers from "initiating police action where the objective is
to discover the alien status of a person." In practice, this means that the
police may not even ask someone they have arrested about his immigration status
until after criminal charges have been entered. They may not arrest someone for
immigration violations. Officers certainly may not check a suspect’s immigration
status prior to arrest, nor may they notify ICE about an illegal alien picked up
for minor violations. Only if an illegal alien has already been booked for a
felony or multiple misdemeanors may they inquire into his status or report him
to immigration authorities. The bottom line: a cordon sanitaire between
local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities that creates a safe
haven for illegal criminals.

Los Angeles’ sanctuary law,
and all others like it, contradicts everything that has been learned about
public safety in the 1990s. A key policing discovery of the last decade was the
"great chain of being" in criminal behavior. Pick up a law-violator for a
"minor" crime, and you’ll likely prevent a major crime. Enforcing graffiti and
turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and robbers.

Los Angeles’ Special Order 40 prohibits officers from "initiating police action where the objective is
to discover the alien status of a person." The bottom line: a cordon sanitaire between
local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities that creates a safe
haven for illegal criminals.

Enforcing known
immigration violations, such as reentry following deportation, against known
felons would be even more productive. LAPD officers recognize illegal deported
gang members all the time — flashing gang signs at court hearings for rival
gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or casing a target. These illegal
returnees are, simply by being in the country after deportation, committing a
felony. "But if I see a deportee from the Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison]
gang crossing the street, I know I can’t touch him," laments a Los Angeles gang
officer. Only if the deported felon has given the officer some other reason to
stop him — such as an observed narcotics sale — can the officer accost him, and
only for that non-immigration-related reason. The officer cannot arrest him for
the immigration felony.

Such a policy is
extraordinarily inefficient and puts the community at risk for as long as these
vicious immigration-law-breakers remain free. The department’s top brass brush
off such concerns. No big deal if you’re seeing deported gangbangers back on the
streets, they say. Just put them under surveillance for "real" crimes and arrest
them for those. But surveillance is very manpower-intensive. Where there is an
immediate ground for arresting a violent felon, it is absurd to demand that the
woefully understaffed LAPD ignore it.

The stated reason for sanctuary
policies is to encourage illegal alien crime victims and witnesses to cooperate
with the police without fear of deportation and to encourage all illegal aliens
to take advantage of city services like health care and education (to whose
maintenance illegals contribute little). There has never been any empirical
verification whether sanctuary laws actually increase cooperation with the
police or other city agencies. And no one has ever suggested not enforcing drug
laws, say, for fear of intimidating drug-using crime victims. But in any case,
the official rationale for sanctuary rules could be honored by limiting police
utilization of immigration laws to some subset of immigration violators:
deported felons, say, or repeat criminal offenders whose immigration status is
already known to the police.

The real reason why cities
prohibit their police officers and other employees from immigration reporting
and enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration policy, the
numbers. The population of illegal aliens and their legal brethren has grown so
large that public officials are terrified of alienating them, even at the
expense of annulling the law and tolerating avoidable violence. In 1996, a
breathtaking Los Angeles Times expose on the 18th Street Gang, which
included descriptions of innocent bystanders being murdered by laughing
cholos [gang members], disclosed for the first time the rate of illegal
alien membership in the gang. In response to the public outcry, the Los Angeles
City Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order 40. You would have
thought they had suggested violating some shocking social taboo. A police
commander warned the council: "This is going to open a significant, heated
debate." City councilwoman Laura Chick put on a brave front: "We mustn’t be
afraid," she said firmly.

On September 5, 2001, Firmer New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's hand-picked
charter revision committee ruled that New York may still require that its
employees keep immigration information confidential. Six days later,
several former visa-overstayers conducted the most devastating attack on
the city and the country in history.

But immigrant pandering, of
course, trumped public safety. Law-abiding residents of gang-infested
neighborhoods may live in terror of the tattooed gangbangers dealing drugs,
spraying graffiti, and shooting up rivals outside their homes, but such distress
cannot compare to a politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At the start of
the reexamination process, LAPD Deputy Chief John White had argued that allowing
the department to work more closely with the INS would give officers another
means to get gang members off the streets. Trying to build a case for homicide,
say, against an illegal gang member is often futile, he explained, since
witnesses fear deadly retaliation if they cooperate with the police. Enforcing
an immigration violation would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now,
without putting a witness’ life at risk.

Six months later Deputy
Chief White had changed his tune: "Any broadening of the policy gets us into the
immigration business. It’s a federal law enforcement issue, not a local law
enforcement issue." Interim Police Chief Bayan Lewis told the Los Angeles Police
Commission: "It is not the time. It is not the day to look at Special Order 40."

Nor will it ever be the
time to reexamine sanctuary policies, as long as immigration numbers continue to
grow. After the brief window of opportunity in 1996 to strengthen the
department’s weapons against gangs, Los Angeles politicians have only grown more
adamant in their defense of Special Order 40. After learning that police
officers in the scandal-plagued Rampart Division had cooperated with the INS to
try to remove murderous gangbangers from the community, local politicians threw
a fit. They criticized district commanders for even allowing INS agents into
their station houses. The offending officers were seriously disciplined by the
department.

Immigration politics have
had the same deleterious effect in New York. Former New York Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary
policy against Congressional override. A 1996 federal law declared that cities
could not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. Oh yeah? said
Giuliani; just watch me. He sued to declare the 1996 federal ban on sanctuary
policies unconstitutional, and though he lost in court, he remained defiant to
the end. On September 5, 2001, his hand-picked charter revision committee ruled
that New York may still require that its employees keep immigration information
confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government. Six days
later, several former visa-overstayers conducted the most devastating attack on
the city and the country in history.

The 1996 federal ban on
sanctuary laws was conveniently forgotten in New York until a gang of five
Mexicans — four of them illegal — abducted and brutally raped a 42-year-old
mother of two near some railroad tracks in Queens. Three of the illegal aliens
had already been arrested numerous times by the NYPD for such crimes as assault,
attempted robbery in the second degree, criminal trespass, illegal gun
possession, and drug offenses. The department had never notified the INS.

Unfortunately, big city
police chiefs are by now just as determined to defend sanctuary policies as the
politicians who appoint them. They repudiate any interest in access to
immigration law, even though doing so contradicts the universally respected
theory of broken windows policing. (Sentiment is quite otherwise among the
rank-and-file, who see daily the benefit that an immigration tool would bring.)

But the same reality that drives cities to enact sanctuary policies —
the growing numbers of legal and illegal immigrants — also cripples federal
authorities’ own ability to enforce the immigration law against criminals. Even
if immigrant-saturated cities were to discard their sanctuary policies and start
enforcing immigration violations where public safety demands it, it is hard to
believe that ICE could handle the additional workload. Perennially starved for
resources by Congress and the executive branch, ICE lacks the detention space to
house the massive criminal alien population and the manpower to manage it. In
fact, little the INS and its successors have done over the last 30 years — above
all its numerous displays of managerial incompetence — can be understood outside
of the sheer overmatch between the agency and the size of the population it
theoretically oversees.

In theory, ICE is supposed
to find and deport all aliens who have entered the country illegally through
stealth or fraudulent documents. (Illegal entry could in theory also be
prosecuted as a misdemeanor by a U.S. Attorney prior to the alien’s deportation,
but such low-level prosecutions virtually never occur.) In fact, immigration
authorities have not gone after mere status violators for years. The chronic
shortage of manpower to oversee, and detention space to house, aliens as they
await their deportation hearings (or, following an order of removal from an
immigration judge, their actual deportation) has forced the agency to practice a
constant triage. The bar for persuading managers to detain someone has risen
ever higher.

Even in the days when the
INS and the police could cooperate, the lack of detention space defeated their
efforts. Former INS criminal investigator Mike Cutler worked with the NYPD
catching Brooklyn drug dealers in the 1970s. "If you arrested someone who you
wanted to detain, you’d go to your boss and start a bidding war," Cutler
recalls. "He’d say: ‘Whaddya got?’ You’d say: ‘My guy ran three blocks, threw a
couple of punches, and had six pieces of ID.’ The boss would turn to another
agent: ‘Next! Whaddid your guy do?’ ‘He ran 18 blocks, pushed over an old lady,
and had a gun.’" But such one-upmanship was usually unavailing. "Without the
jail space," explains Cutler, "it was like the Fish and Wildlife Service — you’d
tag their ear and let them go."

Triage.Currently, the only types of aliens who run any risk of catching
the attention of immigration authorities are, in ascending order of interest:
illegal aliens who have been convicted of a crime; illegal aliens who have
reentered the country following deportation without explicit approval of the
attorney general (a felony punishable by up to two years in jail); illegal
aliens who have been convicted of an "aggravated felony" — a term of art to
refer to particularly egregious crimes; and illegal aliens who have been
deported following conviction for an aggravated felony and who have reentered.
(Aggravated felons become inadmissible for life, whereas mere deported aliens
may apply for a visa after 10 years). A deported aggravated felon who has
reentered may be sentenced for up to 20 years. The deported Mara Salvatrucha
gang members that LAPD officers are seeing back on the streets fall into the
latter category: they are aggravated felons who have reentered, and hence are
punishable with 20 years in jail.

To other law enforcement
agencies, triage by immigration authorities often looks like complete
indifference to immigration violations. An illegal alien who has merely been
arrested 14 times for robbery, say, without a conviction will draw only a yawn
from an ICE district director. In practice, the only real sources of interest
for immigration authorities are aggravated felons and returned deported
aggravated felons.

"Run Letters." Lack of resources also derails the conclusion of the
deportation process. If a judge has issued a final order of deportation (usually
after years of litigation and appeals), ICE in theory can put the alien right on
a bus or plane and take him across the border. It rarely has the manpower to do
so, however. Second alternative: put the alien in detention pending actual
removal. Again, no space and no staff in proportion to demand. In the early
1990s, for example, 15 INS officers were responsible for the deportation of
approximately 85,000 aliens (not all of them criminals) in New York City. The
agency’s actual response to final orders of removal is what is known in the
business as a "run letter" — a notice that immigration authorities send to a
deportable alien requesting that he kindly show up in a month or two to be
deported, when maybe the agency would have some officers and equipment to take
custody of him. The results are foreordained: in 2001, 87 percent of deportable
aliens who received "run letters" disappeared, a number that was even higher —
94 percent — if the alien was from a terror-sponsoring country.

John Mullaly, a former
homicide detective with the NYPD, shakes his head remembering the INS’s futile
task in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, where Mullaly estimates that 70 percent
of the drug dealers and other criminals were illegal. "It’s so overwhelming, you
can’t believe it," he explains. "The INS’s workload was astronomical, beyond
belief. Usually, they could do nothing." Were Mullaly to threaten a thug in
custody that his next stop would be El Salvador unless he cooperated, the
criminal just laughed, knowing that immigration authorities would never show up.
The message sent to the drug lord and to the community could not be more clear:
this is a culture that can’t enforce its most basic law of entry. And if
policing’s broken windows theory is correct, the suspension of one set of rules
breeds more universal contempt for the law.

ICE’s capacity deficit
gives an easy out to police departments when a known immigration violator
commits a terrible crime. Testifying before Congress about the Queens rape by
the illegal Mexicans, New York’s criminal justice coordinator, John Feinblatt,
peevishly defended the city’s failure to notify the INS after the rapists’
previous arrests on the ground that the agency wouldn’t have responded anyway.
"We have time and time again been unable to reach INS on the phone," Feinblatt
told the House immigration subcommittee in February 2003. "When we reach them on
the phone, they require that we write a letter. When we write a letter, they
require that it be by a superior."

No Answer.However inadmirable his failure to take responsibility,
Feinblatt nevertheless was describing a sad fact of life: Even when police
agencies do contact immigration authorities about illegal aliens, they rarely
get a response. Federal probation authorities in Brooklyn, who currently have
148 illegal alien felons on their active caseload, have given up trying to
coordinate with ICE on deportation. "Our thinking is: these guys should be
removed ASAP," says a probation supervisor. "Should the taxpayer be paying for
our services to monitor, investigate, and provide services for individuals who
are not citizens and should not be here at all?" But the supervisor’s sense of
urgency is not answered at the other end of the line. "You send the paperwork
over to the INS, and you never hear back," explains the federal probation
official. "We used to have a person assigned to us from the agency, who told us
to not even bother sending over forms."

Immigration numbers stymied
a program to ensure that criminal aliens were in fact deported after serving
time in federal and state prisons. The Institutional Hearing Program, begun in
1988, was supposed to allow the INS to complete deportation hearings while a
criminal was still in state or federal prison, so that upon his release, he
could be immediately deported without taking up precious detention space. But
the process immediately bogged down due to the magnitude of the problem — in
2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. The
agency couldn’t find enough pro bono attorneys to represent criminal aliens (who
have extensive due process rights in contesting deportation), and so would have
to request continuance after continuance for the deportation hearings. Securing
immigration judges was a difficulty as well. In 1997, the INS simply had no
record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born inmates who had been released
from federal and four state prisons without any review of their deportability.
They included 1,198 aggravated felons, 80 of whom were rearrested for new crimes
in short order.

Resource-starvation is not the only
reason immigration authorities fail to act against criminal aliens, however. The
INS and its successor agencies are creatures of immigration politics, no less
than immigrant-saturated cities and states. Until it was broken up, the agency
had two conflicting missions: handing out immigration "benefits" such as
permanent residency, citizenship, and work permits, on the one hand, and
enforcing the immigration laws against border trespassers, illegal workers,
counterfeiters, and felons, on the other. Local politicians are usually only
concerned about the benefits mission: the more green cards issued in their
districts, the happier the ethnic voters. So INS district directors were
traditionally under enormous pressures to divert enforcement resources into
benefit distribution and away from criminal or other investigations. In the late
1980s, for example, the INS refused to participate in an FBI task force against
Haitian drug trafficking in Miami, for fear it would be criticized for engaging
in "Haitian-bashing." In 1997, the Border Patrol announced it would no longer
accompany Simi Valley, Calif., probation officers on home searches of
illegal-alien-dominated gangs. The change in policy followed protests from
Hispanic activists, after a highly-publicized raid netted nearly two dozen
illegals. Crowed an attorney with the Ventura County Mexican-American Bar
Association: The Border Patrol’s reversal showed that it "can be at times
responsive to the desires of all segments of a community."

The disastrous Citizenship
USA project of 1996 was a classic instance of the politically-driven sacrifice
of enforcement responsibilities to benefit distribution. Citizenship
applications from resident aliens had skyrocketed in the first half of the
1990s, due in part to the increasingly likely prospect of welfare reform. Most
welfare reform proposals promised to disqualify non-citizens from the dole. In
response, welfare-consuming immigrants were applying for citizenship in record
numbers to preserve their eligibility for a monthly government check. The
Clinton Administration sensed a potential political windfall from hundreds of
thousands of newly-naturalized, permanently-welfare-qualified citizens, and
ordered that the naturalization process be radically expedited. Due likely to
relentless administration pressure, a 1996 audit showed that 99 percent of
applications in New York contained processing errors while 90 percent contained
errors in Los Angeles. As a result, tens of thousands of aliens with criminal
records, including for murder and armed robbery, were naturalized.

Immigration numbers also lie behind
the daunting array of due process weapons that criminal aliens deploy to defeat
their deportation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) is a
powerful force on Capitol Hill. It has won an elaborate set of trial rights for
criminal aliens that savvy attorneys can use to keep them in the country
indefinitely. Federal probation authorities in Brooklyn have two illegal aliens
on their caseload — a Jordanian and an Egyptian with Saudi citizenship — who
look "ready to blow up the Statue of Liberty," according to a probation
official, but, at the time of this writing, the department couldn’t get rid of
them. The Jordanian had been caught fencing stolen government checks, such as
Social Security checks and tax refunds; now he sells phone cards, which he uses
himself to make untraceable calls. The Saudi’s offense consisted in using a
fraudulent Social Security number to get employment — a puzzlingly unnecessary
scam, since he receives large sums of money from the Middle East, including from
millionaire relatives. But intelligence links him to terrorism, so presumably he
worked in order not to draw attention to himself. Ordinarily such a minor
offense would not be prosecuted, but the government used whatever it had.
Currently, the Saudi changes his cell phone every month.

Probation overseers
desperately want to see the men deported, but the two Middle Easterners have
hired lawyers and are staging lengthy deportation fights. "Due process allows
you to stay for years without an adjudication," says a probation officer in
frustration. "A regular immigration attorney can keep you in the country for
three years, a high-priced one for ten." In the meantime, Brooklyn probation
executives are watching the bridges.

No Fear of Enforcement.
Finally, the overmatch between the immigration authorities and the numbers of
illegal immigrants mars what should be the happy end of the criminal alien saga:
their deportation. Even where the ICE successfully nabs and deports criminal
aliens, the reality, says a former federal gang prosecutor, is that "they all
come back. They can’t make it in Mexico." The tens of thousands of illegal farm
workers and restaurant dish-washers who overpower U.S border control every year
carry in their wake hundreds or thousands of brutal assailants and terrorists
who use the same smuggling industry as the "good" illegal aliens, and who
benefit from the same irresistible odds: there’s so many more of them than the
Border Patrol.

The government’s inability
to keep out criminal aliens is part and parcel of its inability to patrol the
border, period. The reasons are the same in both cases: numbers-driven politics
and acute institutional incapacity. As a result, for decades, the INS had as
much effect on the migration of millions of illegal aliens into the country as a
can tied to the tail of a tiger. And the immigrants themselves, despite the
boilerplate image in the press of hapless aliens living fearfully in the
shadows, seem to regard immigration authorities with all the concern of an
elephant for a flea.

Fear of immigration
enforcement is not in ready evidence among the hundreds of illegal day laborers
who hang out on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, in front of money wire services,
travel agencies, immigration attorney offices, and phone arcades, all catering
to the local Hispanic population (as well as to drug dealers and terrorists).
"There is no chance of getting caught," cheerfully explains Rafael, an
Ecuadorian. Like the dozen Ecuadorians and Mexicans on his particular corner,
Rafael is hoping that an SUV seeking carpenters for a $100 a day will show up
soon. "We don’t worry, because we’re not doing anything wrong. I know it’s
illegal, I need the papers, but here, nobody asks you for papers."

Even the newly fortified
Mexican border, the only spot in the country where the government devotes
significant resources to preventing illegal immigration, is regarded as a minor
inconvenience by the day laborers. The odds, they realize, are overwhelmingly in
their favor. Miguel, a reserved young Mexican with a 12-year-old son back in
Mexico, crossed the border at Tijuana three years ago with 15 other people
hidden in a truck. Border Patrol spotted the truck, but the outcome was
predetermined. There were six officers to 16 illegals. Five were caught; the
rest, including Miguel, got away. "But even if you’re caught," he reflects,
"they don’t do nothing. You only get one night in jail."

In illegal border
crossings, you get what you pay for, according to Miguel. "If you want your
family to come safely, you pay money. If you want to go over the mountain, pay
little." Miguel’s wife was flying in from Los Angeles that very day, but he was
blasé about it, not even knowing at which airport she was arriving. "Because I
pay, I don’t worry." (The bill was $2,200 this time.) If you try to shave on the
fee, however, the coyotes will abandon you at the first problem. But hasn’t
security gotten tighter at the border recently? I ask him. "You can always find
another way," he shrugs. "Everything’s possible. Para nosotros, es facil.."

Jobs
Magnet
The only way to dampen illegal
immigration and its attendant train of criminals and terrorists, short of
revolution in the sending countries or an impregnably militarized border, is to
remove the jobs magnet. As long as migrants believe they can easily get work,
they will find ways to evade border controls.

Hiring practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated industries are a form of
play-acting: Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid
documents, and thousands of employers pretend to believe them.

But the enforcement of laws
against illegal labor is at the absolute bottom of the government’s priorities.
In 2001, only 124 agents in the entire country were trying to find and prosecute
the hundreds of thousands of employers and millions of illegal aliens who
violate the employment laws, the Associated Press reports. Interior enforcement
generally, whose mandate includes not just the worksite, but also document
fraud, alien smuggling, and criminals, has always been laughably underfunded
compared to border operations, a situation that has been likened to a football
team’s placing its entire defense on the line of scrimmage. Currently less than
2 percent of immigration resources go for interior enforcement, and a mere 2,000
agents police the entire country beyond the borders — responsible for deporting
some 10 million illegal aliens, eradicating thousands of counterfeiters, finding
hundreds of thousands of scofflaw employers, and breaking up smuggling rings.

Lack of Legal Tools. But even were ICE to allocate resources to worksite
investigations commensurate to the magnitude of the violations, not much would
change, because its legal tools are so weak. That’s no accident. Though it is
against the law to hire illegal aliens, a coalition of libertarians, business
lobbies, and left-wing advocates has consistently blocked the prerequisite to
making that ban enforceable: a fraud-proof form of work authorization.
Libertarians have erupted in hysteria at such proposals as a toll-free number
that would allow employers to confirm Social Security numbers with the Social
Security Administration, hurling out comparisons to concentration camp tattoos
and godless Communism. Hispanics warn just as stridently that giving employers a
means to verify work authorization would result in invidious discrimination
against Hispanics — implicitly conceding the point that there are vast numbers
of Hispanics working illegally.

The result? Hiring
practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated industries are a form of play-acting:
Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and thousands of
employers pretend to believe them. The law imposes no obligation on the employer
to verify that a worker is actually qualified to work, and as long as the
proffered documents are not patently phony, the employer will nearly always be
insulated from liability merely by having eyeballed them. To find an employer
guilty of violating the ban on hiring illegal aliens, immigration authorities
must prove that he knew he was getting fake papers — an almost
insurmountable burden. Meanwhile, the market for counterfeit documents has
exploded. Fraud now pervades every aspect of the immigration system. In one
month alone in 1998, the INS seized nearly two million counterfeit documents in
Los Angeles, destined for workers, welfare seekers, criminals, and terrorists.

For illegal workers and
employers, there is no downside to the employment charade. If immigration
authorities ever do conduct an industry-wide investigation, which will at least
net the illegal employees, if not the employers, local congressmen from the
affected areas will almost certainly call it off. An INS inquiry into the
Vidalia onion industry in Georgia in the late 1990s was not only aborted by
Georgia’s Washington delegation, it actually resulted in a local amnesty for the
growers’ illegal workforce. The downside to complying with the spirit of the
employment law, on the other hand, is considerable. Ethnic advocacy groups are
ready to picket employers who dismiss illegal workers, and employers
understandably fear being undercut by less scrupulous competitors.

In 1999, the sheer numbers
of illegal aliens again dictated immigration policy, rather than vice versa. The
INS announced a "major shift" of strategy away from worksite enforcement to
alien smuggling, alien absconders, and document fraud. The agency was merely
rationalizing the real: An official told The Washington Post that the new
priorities reflected an "inability within current resources to deal with the
undocumented population in the U.S." And the revised strategy was little more
than window-dressing: as long as the worksite remains wide open, alien
smuggling, document fraud, and the attendant influx of criminal absconders will
continue at record rates.

The continuing surge of illegal and
legal migrants is changing American politics, demographics, and culture in ways
that have yet to be grasped. But one of the most profound changes is already
visible: the breakdown of the distinction between legal and illegal entry.
Everywhere illegal aliens receive free public education and free medical care at
taxpayer expense. In 13 states, they can get drivers licenses, according to
Mexican officials. States everywhere are being pushed to grant in-state college
tuition and scholarships to illegal aliens; many accede. One hundred banks, over
800 law enforcement agencies, and dozens of cities accept an identification card
created by Mexico to credential illegal Mexican aliens in the United States. The
Bush Administration has given its blessing to this "matricula consular" card,
over the strenuous protest of the FBI. The massive security loopholes in the
card, warns the FBI, make it a natural for money launderers, immigrant
smugglers, and terrorists. Border authorities have already caught an Iranian man
sneaking across the border with a Mexican matricula card, as well as an alien
smuggler with seven cards, each with his picture and a different name.

But the rhetoric of
contemporary immigration is as startling as its legal attributes. Hispanic
advocates have successfully pushed the idea that to distinguish between a legal
and illegal resident is an act of irrational bigotry, not a consequence of the
law. "These are hate, wedge issues," cried Dolores Huerta, a regent of the
University of California, as the California State Senate repealed a
recently-enacted law giving drivers licenses to illegal aliens. In signing the
ill-fated law, former California governor Gray Davis had explicitly renounced
any distinction between illegal and legal immigrants. (An eruption of populist
rage against the measure catapulted Arnold Schwarzenegger into the governor’s
mansion, but ethnic advocates are having the last laugh, since Schwarzenegger,
having repealed the bill, has already promised a revised version.) Arrests of
illegal aliens inside the border are now inevitably accompanied by protests,
often led by the Mexican government, and those protests will inevitably feature
signs calling for No mas racismo. It is the government that is constantly
on the defensive now for enforcing the law, not those who break it.

The editor of Los Angeles’s
biggest Spanish-language daily, La Opinion, reflected recently that the
Virgin Mary would never have imagined that her followers would find themselves
discriminated against not for the color of their skin, but for their lack of
documents. But it is not "discrimination" to
experience the legal consequences of breaking the immigration laws; it is to
encounter the inevitable results of one’s freely-chosen actions.

If the idea of giving voting rights to non-citizen majorities catches on —
and don’t be surprised if it does — Americans could be faced with the
ultimate absurdity of people outside the social compact making rules for
those inside it.

Immigrant advocates now use
the nebulous language of "human rights" to trump such trivia as citizenship
laws. The apprehension of some illegal aliens in San Diego and San Juan
Capistrano, Calif., last summer triggered a huge outcry, well-summed up by
Christian Ramirez of the American Friends Service Committee: The arrests showed
that "the current administration wants nothing to do with human rights," he
said. "They are simply establishing a state of repression in Latino communities
and other immigrant communities across this nation." In other words, no law
enforcement agency has any legitimacy in enforcing the fundamental laws of
entry.

"No Person is Illegal."
The term "amnesty" is under attack, since it implicitly acknowledges the
validity of borders even as it dissolves them. "Amnesty — there’s an implication
that somehow you did something wrong and you need to be forgiven," grouses Rep.
Luis Gutierrez (D- Ill.). It’s the border that is illegal, not the crossing of
it without permission. "No person is illegal," Los Angeles Cardinal Roger
Mahoney told parishioners on a day of protests in California against the repeal
of the driver’s license bill. That same day, a march for amnesty arrived at St.
Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, under the banner: "Messengers for the dignity
of a people divided by a border" ("mensajeros por la dignidad de un pueblo
dividido por la frontera"). New York’s Monsignor Josu Iriondo greeted the
marchers, and repeated their call for the elimination of the border between
Mexico and the United States.

As with every contemporary
protest movement, the push for open borders is replete with the language of
entitlement and plaintive calls for respect and dignity. Illegal aliens and
their advocates speak loudly about what they think the United States owes them,
not vice versa. "I believe they have a right . . . to work, to drive their kids
to school," said California Assemblywoman Sarah Reyes after the license bill
repeal. The organizer of an economic boycott in California against the repeal,
Nativo Lopez of the Mexican-American Political Association, says that the action
is about "justice, dignity, and respect." An immigration agent says that people
he’s stopped in the past "got in your face about their rights, because our
failure to enforce the law emboldens them."

Expect the push to dissolve
any distinction between citizens, legal aliens, and illegal aliens to
accelerate. Joaquin Avila, a UCLA Chicano Studies professor and former legal
advisor to the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF),
argues that to deny non-citizens the vote, especially in the many California
cities where they constitute the majority, is a form of apartheid. Voting laws
allow an ethnic minority (presumably white Californians) to impose their will on
the majority, he says.

Taken to its logical
conclusion, this movement against the law of borders and citizenship points
towards the dissolution of national sovereignty itself. Sen. Alan Simpson
observed in the early 1980s that Americans "are fed up with efforts to make them
feel that [they] do not have that fundamental right of any people — to decide
who will join them and help form the future country in which they and their
posterity will live."

The most striking political
constant in the last four decades of immigration policy is the overwhelming
popular desire to rein in immigration, and the utter pulverization of that
desire by special interests. No poll has ever shown that Americans want
ever-more open borders, yet that is exactly what the elites deliver year after
year. If the idea of giving voting rights to non-citizen majorities catches on —
and don’t be surprised if it does — Americans could be faced with the ultimate
absurdity of people outside the social compact making rules for those inside it.

But the push to annul the
laws of immigration does not even help its purported beneficiaries. Sanctuary
policies contribute to the terrorization of immigrant communities. By stripping
the police of what on occasion may be their only immediate tool to remove a
psychopathic gangster from the streets, sanctuary policies leave law-abiding
immigrants defenseless against the social and financial devastation of crime and
handicapped in the march up the economic ladder. Anyone who cares about their
future success should want every possible law enforcement means deployed to
protect them.

And immigration optimists, who argue that assimilation into
American ideals is proceeding just fine and dandily, should take another look:
In many immigrant communities, assimilation into gangs seems to be outstripping
assimilation into civic culture. Toddlers are being taught to flash gang signals
and to hate the police, reports the Los Angeles Times. In New York City,
"every high school has its Mexican gang," and most 12 to 14-year-olds have
already joined, claims Ernesto Vega, an illegal 18-year-old Mexican who works at
a New York association for Mexican empowerment. Such pathologies are only
exacerbated when the first lesson of American law learned by immigrants is that
Americans don’t bother to enforce it. "Institutionalizing illegal immigration
creates a mindset in people that anything goes in the U.S.," observes Patrick
Ortega, the News and Public Affairs Director of "Radio Nueva Vida" in Southern
California. "It creates a new subculture, with a sequelae of social ills."

Taking immigration law
seriously may make a start in combating these worrisome trends. The police
should be given the option of reporting and acting on immigration violations,
where doing so would contribute to public safety. The decision about when to use
immigration rules will be a matter of discretion, but discretion is at the heart
of all wise policing. The CLEAR Act, now before Congress, would help by
clarifying the authority of local law enforcement to cooperate with immigration
authorities. The police should have access to federal databases of immigration
violators, an idea that the administration is slowly acting upon, against great
opposition from the usual suspects.

And then the successor
agencies of the INS should be given the resources they need. More detention
space should be built, or contracted through private providers, so that
deportable aliens are not released back to the streets. The missing link in
workforce law — a fraud-proof work ID — must be created, and then employers must
be held responsible for demanding it.

Advocates for amnesty argue
that it is the only solution to the illegal alien crisis, because enforcement
clearly has not worked. They are wrong in their key assumption: Enforcement has
never been tried. Amnesty, however, has been tried — in both an
industrial-strength version in 1986, and in more limited doses ever since — and
it was a clear failure. Before we proceed again to the ultimate suspension of
the nation’s self-definition, it is long past time to make immigration law a
reality, not a charade.

Heather Mac Donald is a John M. Olin
fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal.
This Backgrounder is adapted from Ms. Mac Donald’s article, “The
Illegal-Alien Crime Wave” in the Winter 2004 edition of City Journal._____* Courtesy of the Center for Immigration Studies.Backgrounder, June 2004
Mark Krikorian, Executive Director
Center for Immigration Studies
1522 K Street N.W., Suite 820
Washington, DC 20005
See original at < http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/back704.html >.